OMG, my crazy shoulders

Posted in ashtanga yoga on 09/02/2010 10:57 am by karen

I haven’t grabbed any video in a while, so here’s one of my weirdly dark vids. It’s kapo time!

kapo 09-02-10

I laughed out loud when I looked at this and saw how crazy my shoulders are. Some day my elbows will reach the floor. But you know, for as insanely tight as my shoulders are now, they are a billion times more flexible than when I started. And it’s too dark to really see in the vid, but I am managing to touch my feet before my head touches the floor, which is bouncy and extremely entertaining. (If anyone wants to opine on ways to get my elbows to the floor, go for it!)

But that’s not the fun part. The fun part is that after three years of kapo pain and anxiety, this posture now feels delightful and I actually look forward to doing it! It actually makes me happy! But that kind of begs the question, when you look at it from the perspective of a normal person: why in the world would you do something that hurt and was scary every single day (except Fridays and Saturdays and moon days!) for three years?

Then I thought of Dogen:
To study the way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

And then I thought of what Sharath says in Guruji:
It is a way of worshipping God.

Oh, and this morning’s practice was topped off with a terrific dwi pada sirsasana adjustment by The Cop. He’s getting really good at it!

 

Not yet (dwi pada), and the wall doesn’t help

Posted in ashtanga yoga on 08/31/2010 09:46 am by karen

Marching along.

In a couple of weeks, I am due to travel to DC to do a presentation to the Board of Directors about learning innovation.

Did you know there’s a study somewhere that apparently indicates that there are a good number of people who fear public speaking more than they fear death?

This whole thing isn’t as bad as it could be — learning and educational technology is my field, so I can endlessly chatter on about it. The worst are presentations when I’m talking about topics I don’t know a lot about. You think presenters always know what they’re talking about? Think again.

Anyhow, here’s how this plays into Ashtanga practice: Every morning, I march through primary and intermediate to yoga nidrasana. There are two places where I feel some chitta chatter: kapotasana and at the leg behind the head poses.

This morning I recognized that the anxiety around kapo is not about the posture physically. It actually feels *great* these days. Not EASY, of course, but good. Finally, my back is opening, my psoas muscles are releasing, etc., etc. I walk halfway up my feet and feel fine about that. With more practice, it’ll just keep getting better.

So what’s the anxiety? I’m anxious that I’m going to regress, after all of these years of hard work. So every morning I wonder if I’ll not be able to do as well as the day before.

I just have to get over myself on that one. Because there will eventually be regression, and worrying about it won’t affect its eventual manifestation — but it will taint my experience NOW.

The other anxiety is around LBH. Here’s how my body/mind cut me some slack and had a little joke at the same time. When I started LBH, I heard a lot of horror stories about LBH injuries, specifically back injuries. So I was concerned. I didn’t stop working the poses, but I did (do) always feel a bit of a black cloud over my head when I’m sticking my leg behind my head. (There was a similar black cloud over kapo for a good while, where I worried about my spine snapping and a puff of dust rising up out of it — desert-inflected nightmare!) Anyhow, as I was going about my slightly anxious business with LBH, I managed to irritate my right knee. It has kindly stepped up to divert me from my spine anxiety. Surprise!

So back to the public speaking gig. All of the backbends are opening, opening, opening my back, which is great, but I am also conscious of the fact that after a stressful day at work, my back gets kinda crunched back up. Like a flower closing. I feel like I’m going to be having a push-pull with it as the presentation approaches and I try to avoid curling up into myself like the introvert I am.

And that’s when it hit me that the LBH poses are exactly the counterpoint, psychically, to the backbending work. They are strengthening me and insisting I be present. I felt pretty raw during the months when I was doing the intermediate backbends but none of the LBHs: it was all opening up and no strength/resistance to counteract it. I suspect I even seemed overly flexible at work — all openness and not enough steadfastness.

So now I’m building the internal resilience. I am curious to see how that plays out as the presentation approaches. Will it feel different than the usual run up to a Board presentation? Will I default to my usual introverted… um, introversion?

 

Not yet, Proppery

Posted in ashtanga yoga, things i do to myself on 08/23/2010 09:56 am by karen

Not yet.

Okay, I have to admit to watching “The Tudors” (kind of compulsively, truth be told). I am fascinated and horrified by the contrast between the highly mannered court scenes and the brutal torture scenes. And now that I have a mental image of someone on the rack, it has given me a new perspective re: my props.

 

This too will pass

Posted in Uncategorized on 08/16/2010 03:22 am by karen

A little sore in the right knee. ‘Cause of enthusiastic coming-up-from-dropbacks (and probably exacerbated a bit by LBH poses, since the right hip is tighter than the left). These are my downfalls in practice: fear and grasping. The coming-up thing is grasping. It was hard to learn to come up (fear!) and it is VERY hard for me to accept that there might be days when I don’t. “Just be patient,” my brain tells me. “Carry on and it will eventually ‘stick,’ and then you’ll be able to do it always, forever.” Yeah, yeah, I know that’s true — but *in the moment*, when I’m hanging in the balance, I am turning my toes out *just* a bit more to grasp the up. Sigh.

So now the practice is not about coming up, but about paying attention to the soreness (which is always gone when I am warmed up and doing drop backs) and *letting go of the willfulness*. Until, I dunno, maybe Thursday? ;-)

In the meantime, I am also dealing with the fear thing in kapo. It fascinates me how people are comfortable in their bodies in different ways. Rock climbing falls: acceptable. Falling off a mountain bike onto cactus and desert boulders: unacceptable. The Cop’s parameters are exactly opposite. Curling my head under so I can rest my forehead on the floor in kapo (where’re my hips?!) is a little scary, even though it actually feels pretty good. Extending my neck backwards that way is not a comfort move for me. I avoid it. Why do we have these weird kinesthetic preferences? Swami Jyotirmayananda would say “karma,” I’ll bet.

The mechanics of the neck/shoulder curl is good, though, because it means I can always grasp further up my feet in kapotasana. As is often the case, my fear has been overcome by grasping. (She said ruefully.)

At drop backs I thought about my knee and then, magically, also thought about the curled-under feeling of kapo. Uh, duh? Yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing as I arch back for a drop back. Teachers have told me to arch back, but I didn’t understand what they meant. I wish I were one of those people who can figure things out kinesthetically, instead of having to figure physical things out (slowly!) through my head.

So yeah, forehead on the floor in kapo seems equivalent to curling back for drop backs. My backbend intuition is astonishingly poor. It cracks me up.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

 

Lots of things to learn

Posted in Uncategorized on 08/15/2010 03:29 pm by karen

New books coming out!

Richard Freeman!

Yoga and Buddhism!

***

New class in October!

Check out the classes!

I registered yesterday. Classes will start when I’m on vacation in Tucson in October. I was planning on visiting Lisa’s shala in September, but September is now jam packed with a board meeting (DC), a conference (Chicago), and a summit (Phoenix). I’ll be ready for vacay in October, that’s for sure.

***

Dwi pada. I can bring my right foot up enough to bring it even with the left. Just a couple more inches before I ought to be able to make the hook. As Susan suggested, sitting up straight and bandha-ing through it does in fact seem to work better than leaning my head forward.

 

The habitual symmetry of shoulders

Posted in Uncategorized on 08/13/2010 12:14 am by karen

Owl brought up an interesting point re: shoulders. Primary series teaches us a lot about working the hips in different directions, but generally speaking, the shoulders are worked in tandem/symmetrically. As I’m trying to sort out dwi pada, independent movement of the shoulders looks like something worth developing.

During practice this morning I paid attention to my shoulders. Indeed, there is lots of symmetrical movement throughout primary. But there are also opportunities to explore independent movement — particularly in the marichyasanas (A & B especially, it seems).

I think my shoulders are where I do my mind/body split. When I am thinking, I like the way it feels to have all of the energy in my head (like a brain in a jar!), and when I am doing physical things, I like to keep the energy more around my center of gravity/hips. Shoulders are where I make the split. They’ve been left out for a long time. Ought to be interesting trying to integrate them back in. Both for thinking and for doing.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

 

Blogging about dwi pada

Posted in Uncategorized on 08/12/2010 12:27 am by karen

Not yet.

I’m getting the right foot to within 4 inches of the hook, but as I tip forward a bit to catch it behind the left, boing! out shoots the left from behind my head.

And in kapo news, it finally dawned on me that the whole thing is much easier if I put my forehead on the floor instead of the top of my head. Duh?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

 

Test

Posted in Uncategorized on 08/10/2010 11:03 pm by karen

Can I post an entry with a photo from iPad?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

 

No balance, Canine practices

Posted in ashtanga yoga, dogs! on 08/01/2010 03:52 pm by karen

The Cop helped me in dwi pada this morning. Folding back the left leg is easy, but then there I am, right leg flapping around next to me. “Just stick that leg behind the other one,” I said. He seems a little concerned about this every time he helps me. A gentle teacher. It’s coming along. But seriously, the balance on this?? As a wise woman pointed out to me about some poses, “It isn’t there, it isn’t there, it isn’t there, and then it is.”

I’m really hoping that’s true in the way it was for the lift in upavishtha konasana. It wasn’t there, wasn’t there, and then — surprise! — one morning it was. Better that than baddha konasana, where it wasn’t there, wasn’t there, still wasn’t there, hurt like a son of a bitch to even try, was SO not there, needed to be left out entirely, and then, finally, was there.

***

Ever read Chuck Palahniuk’s book, “Choke”? If I didn’t know better I’d think it was about Daisy. She has driven me to research doggie Heimlich maneuvers. Pretty routinely, she scarfs up her food in a way that makes her reel around the bowl, gagging and making horrid noises as she tries to dislodge the obstruction in her throat. It’s pretty scary. Then she goes in the backyard and eats the longest palm frond she can find, or a length of Bermuda grass rhizome. Then she wanders back in the house, stumbling and retching and heaving until I grab it and pull the length of the vegetation out of her throat.

Last night, she grabbed a long nylabone by the end and ran full force toward the couch, launched herself, and hit a bank of pillows. The force of it drove the nylabone straight down her throat. More retching and stumbling until I pulled it out. And sure enough, she did almost the exact same thing this morning.

Canine panchakarma?

 

Breath, Long haul, Teef

Posted in ashtanga yoga, dogs!, things i like on 07/26/2010 12:40 pm by karen

Practice has been super delightful lately ’cause of the breath. My flotation experiences (and yes, I wish they’d just go back to calling it what it is: sensory deprivation) reminded me how much I enjoy breathing when I’m wearing earplugs. So practice these days includes props: the two sticky orange earplugs I bring home from the flotation spa sensory deprivation tank.

Lately I experience my breath as a sphere. Each inhale/exhale is one sphere and a single moment. I don’t think of anything that happens outside the sphere: nothing from the past, nothing from the present. If it isn’t part of the sphere, which is just the inhalation and the exhalation and the sensations of the particular posture or vinyasa, then I put it down. Sweet. It gets progressively harder to do as the week wears on; I find myself thinking about work stuff and playing scenarios in my head. No! No! No! Get out of my breath sphere! I’m entitled to at least 90 minutes per day of being beyond thought constructions, right?

***

Speaking of 90 minutes: at this point I am trekking through primary to yoga nidrasana five days a week. At almost every practice there is an interruption, usually towards the end, where my mind yells, “THIS IS A LONG HAUL!” Then I start the next breath sphere and go on.

***

Waylon, after spending close to two months going around with cuts all over his jowls from Daisy’s violent affections, finally corrected her this weekend. Apparently he nipped her. Neither The Cop nor I saw it; we just heard her yelp, then saw him immediately comfort her. Talk about not holding a grudge. He did it three times over the course of the weekend, and she is now approaching him a little more gently.

Interestingly, The Cop and I had recently started reprimanding her when she was trying to rip his face off, because it didn’t seem like he ever would and it was getting too crazy. I wonder if he finally felt like it was okay, once he saw that The Cop and I didn’t like what was going on.

Still, no matter how rough and tumble she is, how can you not love a face like this?

 
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